Why Steal From the Louvre? It May Have More to Do With Stones Than Art.

When thieves broke into the Louvre on Sunday, they likely weren’t interested in the art masterpieces hanging on the grand museum’s walls. They probably didn’t care about the Paris institution’s priceless statuary collection, either. And, odds-on, they weren’t even interested in the historical provenance of the tiaras, earrings and necklaces they were targeting.

What was probably motivating them, according to art crime experts, was how many jewels and precious metals they could get their hands on to break up and sell on.

The tiara they stole that once belonged to Queen Hortense, for instance, contained 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1,083 diamonds that could potentially be offloaded individually for jewelers to reset in new items, undetected. Any gold the thieves escaped with could be melted down and sold on, too.

The Louvre heist wasn’t really art crime, Vernon Rapley, a former leader of the London police force’s art squad, said in an interview, but “commodity theft.”

Whereas 20th-century museum security teams typically faced the threat of thieves stealing art masterpieces, Sunday’s Louvre heist is the highest-profile example yet of the trend in museum robberies purely for gems or precious metals.

James Ratcliffe, the director of recoveries at the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that maintains a database of stolen artifacts, said that thieves took on a bigger risk when targeting prominent institutions like the Louvre, “but there’s also a bigger reward” given the number of jewels on show. “That’s the gamble,” he added.

Commodity thieves don’t worry about damaging works of art during a raid, Ratcliffe said, or even about leaving some valuable pieces behind. On Sunday, the Louvre robbers tried to steal the crown of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, which features eight gold eagles, 2,490 diamonds and 56 emeralds, but the French culture ministry said the robbers had abandoned that effort after guards interrupted the raid.

That makes some experts skeptical that commodity extraction was the motive for the Louvre break-in. Joanna Hardy, a jewelry specialist who in 2001 sold one of the items targeted on Sunday at a Sotheby’s auction before the Louvre acquired the piece, said that she couldn’t understand the logic of stealing small diamonds for recutting when so many diamonds are available on the market.

“Why would you do this unless you’re really, really stupid?” she said.

If the thieves do try to sell on the jewels, Ellis said gangs historically sold diamonds to dealers in Antwerp, a global hub for gem sales. But, he added, the European Union’s open borders allowed far more options for selling on and distributing stolen material. Bombeke said the jewels would likely be taken out of Europe to be recut.

Over the past two decades, museums and stately homes around Europe have experienced waves of commodity-focused crime.

In Germany, thieves stole a giant gold coin worth several million euros from the Bode Museum in Berlin in 2017, rolling it out in a wheelbarrow. Two years later, members of a notorious Berlin crime family broke into the Green Vault rooms of the Royal Palace museum in Dresden and stole more than 100 million euros’ worth of jewels (about $116 million). And in 2022, thieves stole a cache of 483 ancient gold coins worth an estimated $1.7 million from a museum in southern Germany.

Britain was also hit by a spate of such robberies in the 2010s, most notoriously in 2019 when hooded robbers smashed their way into Blenheim Palace — Winston Churchill’s birthplace — and stole a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet that had been created by the artist Maurizio Cattelan. (Several men were convicted of that theft this year, but the glittering john hasn’t been recovered.)

Arthur Brand, a Dutch art crime expert, said in an interview that the targeting of the Louvre was unsurprising given these patterns, but that a break-in at a museum of such importance would shock other institutions. “If people are capable of robbing the Louvre, museums will be scared no one’s safe,” he said.

On Monday, French lawmakers and newspapers discussed potential security lapses at the Louvre that may have aided the robbery. But Brand said that museums could never stop thefts entirely, even as they put in place deterrents like thicker glass display cases.

Ratcliffe of the Art Loss Register said that all museums faced a “real balancing act” between maintaining public access to their collections and fending off criminals. The Louvre could have prevented Sunday’s robbery by bricking up its windows, Ratcliffe said, but “none of us want going into a museum to feel like entering a bank vault.”